3 CD's later and after 2 hours of searching and messing I finally got this sorted.

Basically I had some ISO images on a network drive of the various versions of XP, since its so fussy about volume/academic/OEM and retail media it means I had to have several.

So since these CDs get scratched lost I had to burn another one, after burning it with Nero I get to 39% of the install then it fails with a redundancy check for i386\asms

On this screen you can press shift+F10 to get a console up, upon CD'ing to the directory I could see the ASMS folder and the various files within it.

The suggestions I found were to:

After trying all of the above (apart from putting a new cd drive in since it's a laptop) my only solution was to obtain another copy of the CD.

It seems that possibly the original image was corrupted, obtaining another copy worked fine in the same laptop.

Unfortunately this maybe isn't the answer you were after, we like to post easy fixes on here but this isn't always the case.

I've more tried to summarise what I think are the most likely fixes, and after the long haul what finally worked for me....getting a new CD!